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The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

lewiscampbell.tech

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Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#111

Post by marssaxman »

I remember a similarly aggressive evangelism about self-driving cars several years ago. I suppose it's not so pleasant, when you feel like you've seen a prophetic glimpse of a brilliant future, to deal with skeptics who don't understand your vision and refuse to give your predictions the credit they deserve.

Of course we need a few people to get wildly overexcited about new possibilities, so they will go make all the early mistakes which show the rest of us what the new thing can and cannot actually do; likewise, we need most of us to feel skeptical and stick to what already works, so we don't all run off a cliff together by mistake.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#112

Post by CapsAdmin »

jordwest wrote: post #44
jimbo1167 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you judging that you'd write "better" code? More maintainable? More efficient? Does it produce bugs in the underlying code it's generating? Genuinely curious where you see the current gaps.

For me the biggest gaps in LLM code are: - it adds superfluous logic that is assumed but isn’t necessary - as a result the code is more complex, verbose, harder to follow - it doesn’t quite match the domain because it makes a bunch of assumptions that aren’t true in this particular domain They’re things that can often be missed in a first pass look at the code but end up adding a lot of accidental complexity that bit…

This has been my experience as well. But, these are things we developers care about.

Coding aside, LLM's aren't very good at following nice practices in general unless explicitly prompted to. For example if you ask an LLM to create an error modal box from scratch, will it also implement the ability to select the text, or being able to ctrl c to copy the text, or perhaps a copy message button? Maybe this is a bad example, but they usually don't do things like this unless you explicitly ask them to. I don't personally care too much about this, but I think it's noteworthy in the context of lay people using LLM's to vibe code.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#113

Post by stephc_int13 »

I tend to share the sentiment of the author.

I think that coding assistants tend to quite good as long as what you ask is close to the training data.

Anything novel and the quality if falling off rapidly.

So, if you are like Antirez and ask for a Linenoize improvement that has already be seen many times by the LLM at training time, the result will seem magical, but that is largely an illusion, IMO.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#114

Post by hu3 »

ymyms wrote: post #108
j2kun wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you should go bundle sub-prime mortgages into some complex securities, if you like intentionally living on the knife's edge of disaster.

Huh? Where did I say that's what I like? I'm just trying to discuss for discussion's sake. Personally, I want a world that rewards the people who put their thought, care, and craftsmanship into something more than those that don't. In order to live in that world, I think we need to discuss the parts (maybe the whole) that don't and why that might be.

don't bother. Your parent commenter is writing some loaded comments in this post.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#115

Post by throwawayffffas »

wild_egg wrote: post #41
rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

After a certain experience level though, I think most of us get to the point of knowing what that difference in quality actually matters. Some seniors love to bikeshed PRs all day because they can do it better but generally that activity has zero actual value. Sometimes it matters, often it doesn't. Stop with the "I could do this better by hand" and ask "is it worth the extra 4 hours to do this by hand, or is this ac…

LLM generated code is technical debt. If you are still working on the codebase the next day it will bite you. It might be as simple as an inconvenient interface, a bunch of duplicated functions that could just be imported, but eventually you are going to have to pay it.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#116

Post by vunderba »

ymyms wrote: post #38
j2kun wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author claims it's not just that one evangelizes it, but that they become hostile when someone claims to not have the same experience in response. I don't recall Either Willison or Antirez scaring people by saying they will be left behind or that they are just afraid of becoming irrelevant. Instead they just talk about their positive experiences using it. Willison and Antirez seem to be fine to live and let live…

My gut says that is not a property of LLM evangelists, but a property of current internet culture in general. People with strong, divisive, and engaging opinions seem to do well (by some definition of well) online.

This. For every absurd LLM cheerleader, there’s a corresponding LLM minimalist who trots out the “stochastic parrot” line at every possible occasion along with the fact that they do CrossFit and don’t own a TV.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#117

Post by ookblah »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #94
ookblah wrote: post #29

"LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were." lol. is this supposed to be like some sort of "gotcha"! yes? like maybe i am a really shitty programmer and always just wanted to hack things together. what it has allowed me to do is prevent burnout to some extent, outsource the "boring" parts and getting back to buil…

Not really. I use LLMs for things I am not good at. But I also know I am not good at them. No one is good at everything. 100% fine.

hmm, maybe you are not as good at using llms as you think then? lol jk.

i mean if you have imposter syndrome then this feeling will always be prevalent. how do you know what you are good at or not? i might be competent enough to have progressed this far in my career as in "results", but comparison to people i consider "good" devs always puts in that doubt.

i guess it strikes a chord when someone in the same breath of claiming to be open minded makes a backhand comment where people who like llms might just must be a shitty programmer or whatever. i get the point, but that line doesn't quite land the way you think it does.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#118

Post by tracerbulletx »

czhu12 wrote: post #93

To be fair to both sides, it really is hard to tell if we're in the world of "you'll be left behind if you don't learn crypto" with crypto or "you'll be left behind if you don't learn how to drive" with cars One of those statements is made in good faith, and the other is made out of insecurity. But we'll probably only really be able to tell looking backwards.

I don't really see the point in worrying about prompting, and agents and mcps, and skills and all this as a skill to learn. They're trivial if you're already a developer and if it gets good enough that you don't need to know software engineering, there's not going to be anything to learn. Setting it up is a subset of software engineering so it will be able to do that its self once it can solve problems reliably without someone to understand what's going on to check it.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#119

Post by throwawayffffas »

christophilus wrote: post #21
rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

Claude Code is way better than I am at rummaging through Git history, handling merge conflicts, renaming things, writing SQL queries whose syntax I always forget (window functions and the like). But yeah. If I give it a big, non-specific task, it generates a lot of mediocre (or worse) code.

That's funny that's all the things I don't trust it to do. I actually use it the other way around, give it a big non-specific task, see if it works, specify better, retry, throw away 60% - 90% of the generated code, fix bugs in a bunch of places and out comes an implemented feature.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#120

Post by nitwit005 »

rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

It'd be rather surprising if you could train an AI on a bunch of average code, and somehow get code that's always above average. Where did the improvement come from?

We should feed the output code back in to get even better code.

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